High contrast black and white, toner grit and a hand-set layout. Start from a cover template or straight from your photo.
Open the editor with this effect
Zines look the way they do because of the photocopier. One master, a stack of cheap paper, and a machine that crushes every grey into black or white. The cover is the only page anyone sees before they pick it up, so it carries the whole personality of the issue: a strong image, a hand-set title, and the honest grit of a copy of a copy.
A photocopier has very little range in the middle. Light greys fall to white, dark greys fill in to black, and the photo turns into hard shapes. That is why zine covers feel so graphic even when the original was an ordinary snapshot.
Toner is not perfectly even. It clumps in the darkest areas, leaves specks on the white, and streaks slightly in the direction the paper travels.
Every generation makes it stronger. A copy of a copy loses more midtones and gains more noise, which is how covers end up looking worn in before they leave the shop.
In Bitgrain the Photocopy effect handles the first part, crushing tone around a threshold you set, and grain on top adds the uneven toner. Run a dither before it for the specks and broken edges of a worn copy.
Pick one image and crop hard. A zine cover is small, often A5 or half letter, so a face or an object filling the frame works better than a wide scene.
Make the title big and keep it clean. A crisp title over a gritty photo is easy to read. A distressed title over a distressed photo usually is not.
Leave room for the issue number and date. Regular readers look for them, and they make a series feel like a series.
Think about the back cover too. Many zines are folded from one sheet, so the back sits right next to the front when it is printed.
Design in black and white if it will be photocopied for real. Colour that looks good on screen often turns into a muddy grey on a copier.
Keep a true black and a true white somewhere on the cover. Without them the whole thing turns grey after a couple of generations.
Avoid fine detail near the edges. Home printers and copiers rarely print right to the edge of the sheet.
Open the editor from this page and a hard black and white dither with grain is already set. Drop in your photo and export it.
Or start from a book cover or flyer template in the studio, swap in your image and add the Photocopy effect to it there, with its own contrast and threshold controls.
Set the title, issue number and date. Check the cover at its real printed size before you commit.
Export a PDF or full size PNG for printing, and a smaller version to share online.
Crush the midtones with high contrast, convert to black and white, and add grain so the toner looks uneven. The Photocopy effect in the studio does this in one step, and the dither preset on this page gets you close in the photo editor.
A5 and US half letter are the most common, because they come from folding a standard sheet in half. Mini zines folded from a single sheet are even smaller.
Yes. Export a PDF or a PNG and print it on any home printer or copier. Full resolution export is on Pro, the free tier exports at web resolution with a small watermark.
Book cover and flyer templates make good zine covers. They open as layers, so you can replace every word and image and keep only the layout you like.